DNDCards.com — The Account Hub & Builder

DNDCards.com is the family's account hub and card-and-character builder — the shared cards instance every other DND site reads from.

DNDCards.com is where the world gets built. It is your account hub, your card-and-character forge, and the canonical cards instance that DND.chat and DNDWar.com read from. Everything else in the family plays on the cards and characters you assemble here. Build once; use it family-wide.

Cards are the unit of everything

DNDCards is card-native. Every card is a row on a kanban board, dropped into lists you arrange however the campaign demands. Under the hood each card carries:

a category — one of NPC, Player, Spell, Location, Monster, Item, Class, Quest, Note — each with its own sigil and accent color;
a flexible stats array of {label, value} rows (this is the load-bearing convention combat reads — see Cards & the Shared Compendium);
optional JSONB combat payloads (monster_data for full statblocks, item_data for magic-item hooks).

Two category rules are worth knowing up front. Player cards are never hand-authored — they only appear when you link a character (see below). And Quest cards default to hidden (revealed:false), so players see an obscured card until you, the DM, choose to reveal the hook.

Four ways to add a card

Open a board and click Add Card. You have four paths to a new card:

Method	What it does	Where
Bind a new card	Hand-author a card: Title, optional Subtype and Quick hint, a category, and a Mark as alive toggle.	Add Card → the bind form
AI generate	Streams a complete card — title, stats, flavor — from a short prompt, tuned per category.	Add Card → AI tab
Invoke	Mints a copy of an official or homebrew compendium card (`srd_cards`) onto your board.	Add Card → Invoke tab
Shred PDF	Extracts cards from an uploaded adventure PDF.	Add Card → Shred tab

A note on terms: on DNDCards (and DNDWar), the action of pulling a compendium card onto your board is Invoke — the button literally reads "Invoke." There is no /summon here; /summon is the DND.chat tavern command. The mechanics of the shared compendium, the SRD library, and official-vs-homebrew editability live on the Cards & the Shared Compendium page.

The character builder

DNDCards hosts the shared character builder — the same @dnd/character-builder wizard that renders natively across the whole family. It steps you through Identity → Species → Class → Background → Abilities → Skills → Equipment, then an optional Portrait and Flavor pass, then a Review. On save it inserts a real character row scoped to your account.

Creating a character has two automatic side effects: it mints a linked Player card on the campaign board (prefilling Race/Class/HP and the portrait), and it mints your chosen starting gear as owned Item cards so the kit shows in the sheet's inventory. The full step-by-step — including gating rules and the honest edge cases (a new character starts with no AC until the sheet or DM sets it) — is in the Building a Character walkthrough.

The Homebrew Forge and the PDF Shredder

Two of the family's heavyweight tools live here, because DNDCards owns the compendium and the import pipeline:

The Homebrew Forge — author your own compendium cards (Monster, NPC, Item, Spell, Class) in a guided wizard, with an optional AI draft and AI art. Forged cards start Private to you and can be submitted for community review. Full guide: The Homebrew Forge.
The PDF Shredder — upload an adventure PDF and turn it into reusable cards, with OCR for scanned books and SRD enrichment that links a shredded "Goblin" to its real statblock. It can also project an adventure flow into the DND.chat Autopilot DM. Full guide: The PDF Shredder. (Note: the PDF Shredder is a DNDCards feature — DNDWar has none and only links out to it.)

Your account hub

Beyond the boards, DNDCards is the family's account home. The /profile dashboard shows your cards-created count and a cosmetic DM rank — Novice, Journeyman, Loremaster, Archloremaster — which is a gamification flourish, not a paid tier. Each account also gets a public vanity page at /user/[username], with per-character pages at /user/[username]/[slug].

Because one signup is one account across the family, the workspace and campaigns you create here are the same ones you'll see in DND.chat and DNDWar — see How It All Connects for the shared-database details, and One Membership, Every Site for what your single membership covers. Everything is free during the current beta.

The cards instance

This is the heart of DNDCards' role in the family: it is the cards instance. The per-campaign cards on your boards and the global compendium it curates are exactly what DND.chat's /summon conjures and what DNDWar's Invoke picker drops onto the battlemap. A board lives at dndcards.com/board?campaign=<id>, and any card you build, generate, invoke, or shred there is immediately reusable as a chat card or a tactical token — one prep, three surfaces.

Ready to put it together with a group? See Running a Connected Group Session.